Boch Hollow - Day 76

  As we were approaching the parking for Boch Hollow, we saw there was a ranger there, posting a sign. We didn't want to engage with him in case he was going to tell us we couldn't hike. We drove a little farther down the road and waited until he left. Fortunately, he had only added a sign warning hikers to wear traction devices on their shoes. We were already certainly planning on that!

This lovely pool is just under the bridge in a small tributary of Rush Creek.

We had opted to not hike this section yesterday afternoon because we suspected the trail was going to be in very bad condition. Imagine our surprise when we discovered work crews had already been out clearing!

They hadn't made it all the way through yet.

Boch Hollow is a State Nature Preserve, and it has lots of these limestone caves. Of course they are all dripping with icicles now.

You are supposed to stay on the trails, but they do a good job of leading you to interesting things to see. As well as rock cliffs, there are just ROCKS. Notice Denali for scale.

A little over half way through, we encountered a DNR work crew. The Bobcat had come in on a service road, and they were making quick work of a huge pile of trees that was down at another creek crossing. They were pretty shocked to actually see hikers. We made sure we thanked them a lot.

We were prepared for this to possibly take us the entire day. But we got through in a little over 2 hours. We were happy!

As it was, we had time to do some more off-road trail in the Athens Unit of the Wayne National Forest. This turned out to involve some pretty iffy driving, but we made it to our end point (and back to the start, and out again after hiking). We still needed our traction devices for most of this walk, but one space in the afternoon sun was quite free of snow and ice.

We are pretty happy with what we managed today. We did 8.7 miles, all off-road in snow and ice. All of it was really nice trail.

Miles today: 8.7. Total miles so far: 977.1.

Blogging early, so we can spend the evening with Jeff and Kathy.

See What's with the Doll Heads?